Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed has said that it did not matter if the price for crude oil falls as low as $5; for Nigeria to succeed, corruption must be defeated.
The minister made the call during a courtesy visit to Rariya and Aminiya, two Hausa language newspapers based in the nation’s capital.
Explaining the reason for his visit, the minister said he was there to garner their support for the federal government’s war against corruption. Mohammed said he was certain the large followership of the papers would help to communicate the importance of this to the general public.
“If only we fight corruption successfully, there will be more money for everybody. If the leakages can be blocked successfully, I can assure you it won’t matter whether oil sells for $10 or $5, we will be able to run this country efficiently.
“If we don’t really take care of corruption, even the 2016 budget, we will not be able to operate it because what we have found out is that it is these leakages (corruption) that are making the country to bleed. It is not by accident that between 1999 and today, the budget has been increasing every year yet poverty has also been increasing. Why? Because of corruption.
“In 1999, the entire budget was N947 billion, in 2016, it is N6 trillion. Has poverty gone down? It has increased almost by that margin. The issue of corruption must not be taken lightly. We must fight it as we fought Boko Haram, like we fought Ebola. We must fight it to a standstill,” he said.
The Minister hailed the indigenous language newspapers for bridging a critcal information gap by ensuring that those who could not read in English are fully kept abreast of developments in the country, calling them ”the unsung heroes of our democracy”.
“You are catering for those who could have normally been left behind…I am really impressed with the sacrifices you are making. In nation-building, everybody plays his or her own part. We might be the ones that people see today but there are people like you who are toiling, risking their ventures, fortunes and risking their lives just to get people informed,” he said,
In his remarks, the Publisher of Rariya newspaper and former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Dr. Aliyu Modibbo, described the Minister’s visit as historic, saying Alhaji Mohammed is the first Information Minister in the country’s recent history to visit an indigenous language newspaper in the country.
He said Rariya newspaper was gradually migrating to online journalism because of its tremendous appeal to the people, having recorded 290,000 consistent readers online and 1.4 million followers on Facebook.
